To Eternity. Daisy Banks
been stunning. No wonder Julia had fallen for him. She couldn’t understand why Julia hadn’t married him when he asked. She sighed, lost in the sadness of the tale of their relationship.
We won’t end like that, not if I can persuade him to make us permanent.
Love should be about romance, tenderness, hopes for a future together, but for her it meant many other things. She swiped on her blusher, but the bronze pink only seemed to highlight her pallor. A quick slick of lipstick did nothing to help her. She didn’t bother with more than one light coat of mascara.
In the dressing room they shared, she sorted through her armoire for clothes. Though her current mood screamed Gothic Queen, she donned some lime green leggings with a long silk shirt decorated in a Celtic lattice design. She peeked out the tiny window. The day looked cold with an ice-blue sky. From the sway of the tall trees, it was windy, too. She rummaged through one of the drawers and found a clingy knee-length sweater.
Heartbeat rising with concerns for their discussion, she went through to the bedroom. She dumped her sweater on the chair before she opened the door to the wet room. She caught a glimpse of his slick, dark, wet hair dripping on his broad shoulders. The water cascaded down his back to his firm-muscled ass. Still, his pain beat at her like a night fury. Not anger, but an aching hurt she could do nothing to relieve. She called into the shower. “Shall I pour you some coffee?”
The full power of the spray, along with a waft of steam, drowned out his response. She closed the door. Rather than wait, she poured two cups anyway. Curling her hand around her cup, she settled herself in the huge, oak chair in front of the hearth to wait for him to join her. The carving at the end of the curtained four-poster bed, of two wolves with bodies entwined, spoke to her the same way it had the first time Magnus brought her into this room he’d kept as a private sanctuary for so long. This hand-chiseled image, a reference to his parents who had commissioned the monumental bed, gave her hope. They’d loved, as humans and wolves, their pairing bound in a permanent connection. They’d produced offspring. A son, this magnificent, wonderful man, wolf, person. A wave of emotion brought a lump to her throat while she weighed the possibilities against the current reality. Blinking fast, she swiped at her eyes.
This mood would bring her no good. Crying wouldn’t solve a thing. She’d end up with a sore throat, red eyes, a swollen nose, and none of it would help. If Magnus found her in tears, it would stoke his guilt further. He might even try to send her back to her flat in London. The line she trod with him demanded the balance skills of a gymnast on the beam. Yes, he cared about her, she was certain…up to a point.
Maybe he loved her enough to send her away. Fresh tears welled for she could imagine his explanation. I can’t hurt you like this anymore. You must leave.
Heaven help her, he’d mean every word of it. He’d send her away, then bury himself in majestic misery here while he waited for her to age and die.
“Bugger it all.” Her voice cracked as she set her coffee cup down on the small table beside her chair. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll not leave you, not unless you take me back to London and dump me there, Magnus. I belong here.”
The oak wolves stared back from the wood panel with a silent offer of agreement.
“Too right,” she said forcing herself to relax. “I agreed to stay with him and I will. He’ll just have to get accustomed to a female being around all the time. I’m going nowhere.”
“Had you planned on going somewhere?” he asked, toweling his dark hair as he walked in from the wet room.
“No, I was giving myself a bit of a pep talk.” She sucked in the sight of his broad shoulders, the ripples of muscle on his chest. Her gaze moved down to the towel he’d draped around his middle, clinging snug to the damp curve of his ass. Rising from the chair, she hurried to him, wrapped her arms around his waist, and laid her head on his smooth damp shoulder. Her previous experiences had been nothing like this compulsive need for Magnus. When she was nineteen, she’d had a bit of a glow about one boyfriend, but it was a timid kind of affection, rather like standing under a warm shower. With Magnus, she swam in an ocean of unfamiliar sensations, and though some might be scary, she didn’t want them to stop. She wouldn’t stand by silent if Magnus tried to end their relationship because of his guilt for who and what he was, even if he thought it would be good for her.
He laced his fingers through her hair and cupped her skull with his palm so he could tilt her head back until she stared up into the depths of his gaze. He angled his head to take her lips with his. After so many days with no contact, not even in their dreams, their kiss dragged her into a whirlpool of desire. Her heart raced fast. He rubbed his freshly shaved jaw against her chin. Smooth like a coil of moist silk, his tongue rolled with hers, twined, twisted, teased. She moaned.
Fighting for breath, she lifted her lips from his and pulled back. “Not now, not yet,” she whispered.
“I know. Allow me to dress. I think it is best we deal with this situation by distancing ourselves from it.”
A rush of determination hit. The same way she’d once dealt with Franklyn’s mercurial moods, she prepared to counter whatever arguments Magnus might have for her to leave. “I’m not going back to London. Not on my own. I swear to you, I’ll find my way back here. I’ll home, just like the pigeon on a ship that crossed the Atlantic. It still got back to where it belonged. I will, too. You want me to stay, I know it.”
“If you go to London, I promise I will be with you.” A smile followed his words, tender, needy, and half-amused, lifting his former gloom to the expression she’d become more familiar with, the one that so touched her heart.
“I meant merely to suggest,” he said, “we might leave the house today, perhaps go to a public place where…” The gleam in his gray eyes met her gaze, sending a torrent of need for him pounding through her.
“I want you, right this second.”
Magnus shook his head. “I know. I’m afraid the consequences might be to neither of our liking. As long as you don’t have to work on the preparations for the film shoot today we will go out. We can visit”—he gazed up to the ceiling—“anywhere you like in a twenty mile radius.”
She couldn’t still the smile or stop the tingle in her nipples. When she first visited to check the house out for the Timeless shoot, he’d been a total recluse for more years than she’d been alive. He might look like a man in his early thirties but his true age was far older. That he would suggest a trip out of the house today thrilled her, despite the cause for his suggestion. A journey away from what had nearly become his tomb showed a kind a trust she’d wondered if she’d ever get.
She offered him a smile. “Well,” she said, pressing a kiss to his smooth chest, “as it happens, everyone thinks I am out of contact until tomorrow. No details about the full moon being the reason, of course, but I had to tell them I’d not be available. I can’t do anything to move the project on until I get a few e-mails back in answer to questions I’ve asked. I also need Richard’s fresh response to my running order. Therefore, I have time on my hands that I can devote all to you. So, yes, we can go out. I’d best do something with my hair. After that, I’ll get the local attractions leaflet printed out.”
Magnus cupped her chin with his palm, then brushed his lips over hers. “An excellent idea.” A single judder on contact told her how he forced control over his baser urges. She was still struggling with hers.
* * * *
“This house feels so homey, so comfortable,” she whispered.
“I agree. Hatfield has magic in the air.”
“Have you visited here before?”
“Yes, I’ve visited once or twice, but not for some time.”
She darted a glance to him. “Not for some time” might mean fifty years, two hundred years, or perhaps longer. Not a topic they could discuss in such a public place. She held the questions inside and stared at The Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I. “I think this image is magical.”